Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Your chance to win "Buffalo Unbound" by Laura Pedersen

Laura Pederson is releasing another book and this time she and I are giving you a chance to win a copy. All you have to do is comment on this blog and you'll be entered to win. Make sure you include an email address so I can contact you if you win. The winner will receive a copy of "Buffalo Unbound" and Pedersen's previous book "Buffalo Gal"

I'll be drawing the random winner Friday October, 22 so enter now. Only one entry per e-mail address.

BUFFALO UNBOUND: A Celebration by Laura Pedersen.

When Forbes magazine recently ranked Buffalo, New York, eighth on a list of America's 10 Most Miserable Cities, former New York Times columnist Laura Pedersen set out to celebrate the people and places that make Buffalo the Most Exciting City. In BUFFALO UNBOUND, a follow-up to her award-winning memoir BUFFALO GAL, Pedersen captures the current renaissance in a humorous conversational style that would make former Nickel City newspaperman Mark Twain proud.

Writing about the economic collapse and social unrest of her 1970s childhood in Buffalo, New York, Laura Pedersen was struck by how things were finally improving in her beloved hometown. As 2008 began, Buffalo was poised to become the thriving metropolis it had been a hundred years earlier—only instead of grain and steel, the booming industries now included health care and banking, education and technology. Folks who'd moved away due to lack of opportunity in the 1980s talked excitedly about returning home. They missed the small-town friendliness, and it wasn't nostalgia for a past that no longer existed—Buffalo has long held the well-deserved nickname the City of Good Neighbors. The diaspora has ended. Preservationists are winning out over demolition crews. The lights are back on in a city that's usually associated with blizzards and blight rather than its treasure trove of art, architecture and culture.

"Buffalo Gal"Growing up in the snowblower society of Buffalo, New York, Laura Pedersen s first words were most likely turn the wheel into a skid. Like many families subsisting in the frigid North during the energy crisis, the Pedersens feared rising prices at the gas pump, argued about the thermostat, fought over the dog to stay warm at night, and often slept in their clothes. While her parents were preoccupied with surviving separation and stagflation, daughter Laura became the neighborhood wild child, skipping school, playing poker, betting on the horses, and trading stocks. Learning how to beat the odds, by high school graduation Pedersen was well prepared to seek her fortune on Wall Street, becoming the youngest person to have a seat on the American Stock Exchange and a millionaire by age 21. Combining laugh-out-loud humor with a slice of social history her hometown was a flash point for race riots, antiwar protests, and abortion rallies, not to mention bingo, bowling, and Friday night fish fries Pedersen paints a vivid portrait of an era.

Read Laura’s account of the rise, fall and rebirth of the Rust Belt city.More information about Laura Pedersen and her books can be found online at: http://www.laurapedersenbooks.com.